CHAPTER VI 
SOUTH AGAIN I NEW ZEALAND AND THE CAPE 
In ten days they made the Three Kings' Islands, and on 
Augast 16 entered the Bay of Islands, New Zealand. Here the 
ships stayed till November 17. New Zealand was still regarded 
by many who had spent years there as hopeless for colonisation. 
* Colonists,' wrote Dr. Sinclair sweep ingly, * had nothing to 
do except they put themselves on a par with the natives and 
breed pigs, cultivate potatoes on the sides of hills and perhaps 
turn savages.' To a botanist, however, it was fascinating. 
Hooker, under the guidance of Mr. Colenso,^ the printer to the 
missionary establishment, and himself a keen botanist, made 
a number of excursions into the country, though it was all 
too swampy to go far, collecting many specimens, especially 
of the Cryptogams, for the Bay of Islands was otherwise a 
comparatively well-known centre. 
From New Zealand, on November 23, 1841, the ships set 
out for their second voyage to the South, sailing on a more 
easterly meridian in order to reach the Great Ice Barrier at 
the point where they had been compelled to turn back the 
1 William Colenso (1811-99). He was bom at Penzance, and was a 
cousin to the late Bishop Colenso of Natal. As a youth he was apprenticed 
to a printer of Penzance, and later was employed by the British and Foreign 
Bible Society in the same capacity. The Society sent him to New Zealand in 
1834 with the first printing press established there. In 1844 he became a 
missionary, and after training at St. John's Coll., Auckland, was ordained to 
a church in Napier, where he lived till his death. His botanical writings, though 
numerous, are fragmentary and are chiefly contributions to the Tasmanian 
Journal of Natural Science and of the New Zealand Institute, &c. For sixty 
years he collected information regarding the language, customs, songs, &c. of 
the Maori. F.L.S. 1865 and F.R.S. in 1886. Sir Joseph named the gr-nus 
Colcnsoa after him. 
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